White House aides won't say if Obama smokes

by Philip Elliot - Jun. 22, 2009 06:29 PMAssociated Press

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama seems to have broken one of his first campaign promises: to kick his cigarette habit.

Although he agreed to quit smoking if his wife, Michelle, allowed him to run for the White House, the president acknowledged Monday it's been a challenge to stay away from cigarettes that have been part of his life, off and on, for the past three decades.

As he signed the nation's toughest anti-smoking law Monday aimed at keeping thousands of teens from getting hooked, Obama ruefully touched on his habit he began years ago.

"I was one of these teenagers," he said. "And so I know how difficult it can be to break this habit when it's been with you for a long time."

And while Obama praised the historic legislation, which gives the Food and Drug Administration unprecedented authority to regulate what goes into tobacco products, he didn't say how his own struggle was coming along since he moved into the White House.

Aides, again, followed the boss' lead.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said he hadn't asked Obama about his smoking and made it clear that he didn't plan to. The presidential spokesman stuck to vague language that left the impression Obama still occasionally falls off the wagon, but he did not say so directly.

"I don't, honestly, see the need to get a whole lot more specific than the fact that it's a continuing struggle," Gibbs said. "He struggles with it every day."

It was a struggle that predated his campaign - and almost blocked it.

While he and Mrs. Obama discussed whether the then-senator from Illinois should consider a White House run, she made him promise the family he would put down his lighter if were to head out on the campaign trail.

"I hate it," Michelle Obama told CBS' "60 Minutes" during the presidential campaign's early days. "That's why he doesn't do it anymore, I'm proud to say. I outed him - I'm the one who outed him on the smoking. That was one of my prerequisites for, you know, entering this race is that, you know, he couldn't be a smoking president."

Well, not exactly.

During Obama's two-year White House bid, he was known to occasionally bum a cigarette from a staff member - while also making sure to emphasize his efforts to stop for good and his progress from his one-time five-smoke-a-day average.

During Monday's bill signing, Obama focused on how the new law would help keep future generations of kids away from the dangerous habit. It bans candy-flavored cigarettes and the use of other flavored smokes that might appeal to teenagers. Ads aimed at young people also are banned.

The president mentioned his own experience very briefly - just 30 words.

"I don't know what the appropriate word count would have been in order to check the box," Gibbs said when asked about the brevity of comments. "And, again, I think the president spoke about this in personal terms, regardless of the word count."

Obama has veered between frank and cagey about his personal battle with smoking. He has often acknowledged since that he has "fallen off the wagon." But he hardly ever provides specifics.

And though White House aides pack nicotine gum in their jackets to help him resist, they also refuse to give a clear answer to the question of whether the president still sneaks a smoke now and again.

Still, it's not as if Obama was ever even a pack-a-day puffer.

"I've never been a heavy smoker," Obama told The Chicago Tribune in 2007. "I've quit periodically over the last several years. I've got an ironclad demand from my wife that in the stresses of the campaign I don't succumb. I've been chewing Nicorette strenuously."